Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Nice work @jennypenny! I'll have to try to remember your tip about cooking in-tune with the temp/humidity; there's definitely been a couple nights where I regretted boiling some water instead of baking something!

The winter break allowed me to look at the vacant apartment's electricity usage (from the utility company's website). Looks like the fridge pulls around 1kW each day during the winter (with no one opening it and the oven not heating it). Somewhere (cumulatively) there's a 15Wh idle draw.. Granted, it doesn't seem like any of this much matters for my costs.. the electricity bills have ranged from $33-43.

@bryan - I think you got your units mixed up?!

@Jennypenny: I once told a younger friend about my energy and water usage, and what I do to diminish them. He said to me that's peanuts, he said he did not have time to look after those little things. Recently he divorced and his former wife asked me about finances. Then I noticed the younger friend and his wife earned the last five years more than € 200.000 per year, but at divorce time they had no savings, a mortgage over 400 k and tax debts about 60k. How glad I am that I look after peanuts....

For our family home our costs are € 84 (of which is € 50,28 fixed cost for be connected to grid) per month for heating, electricity and water. This amount is about 49% of normal usage in our country by 2 persons in our type of house.
I have corrected the normal usage because we live 3 months p/y abroad.

Erm, yeah (the fridge uses at minimum 1kWh each day and there's a (cumulative) idle draw of 15W somewhere). Interesting that the hour view of the utility's online dashboard gives kWh vs time of day.. it makes sense; but then again if your x axis is time, you might think the y axis would be power.

I opened up my most recent electric bill (Dec 16-Jan 18) and it was more than double the normal cost(!) so I decided to investigate.

Context: We rent a ~1300sf apartment with a new heat pump in the mid-Atlantic (DC-Baltimore region). The apartment was built in the 80s without much focus on energy efficiency. The (original) windows and doors leaked air badly when we moved in, but I've plugged that up best I can. All of our energy use is 100% electric, and I always figured that a big fraction of our energy use was from heating/cooling. So I've taken the last 6-ish months of daily kWh and plotted it against the average daily temperature. Just to give you an idea of our lifestyle - we set the thermostat at 58-62F in the winter and 78-82F in the summer (so a ~20F indoor seasonal temperature swing). If the outdoor temperature is within that range, we usually open the windows to manage the indoor temp as necessary. The average daily temperature of our coldest month (January) is ~35F.



Findings: Initially I was thinking that the relationship would be U-shaped, with the heat pump driving high energy use during the winter and the summers. Boy was I wrong - apparently running the heat pump in the summer is almost negligible for us (compared to other energy usage). Anyway, the graph tells the whole story: the two week arctic blast that came down last month represents all of the points lower than 25F. The blue dashed fit line shows that our energy use goes up about 2.2kWh per day for each degree under ~42F. During that arctic blast, we were using 5x more energy than normal (just to get up to 58F - just think how much people were using to stay at 72!).

Conclusions: I had heard that we are situated at the northern boundary of where it makes sense to have a heat pump, because they don't do well in the cold. And yet just about everyone around here has a heat pump . The McMansions have two (one for each floor??). If you consider that winters get to ~35F on average, I can understand the case for a heat pump: the curve at 35F isn't so bad. But considering that 1) the temperature actually fluctuates around 35F, sometimes wildly, and 2) the low end is extremely steep - the case gets blurrier.

Anyway, this definitely explains my aberrantly high electric bill this month.

So, is this the place to brag about your low energy usage? This year, (feburari 2017 - februari 2018) I used a total of 493 kWh.

Context:

I live in a studio with electrical cooking, but I have a A++ energy label washing machine and an A+++ freezer (and no fridge since two months, I guess that one was A+). I mostly use my Macbook Air, and my smartphone. My gaming PC was seldom used the past year. When I listen music, I do it directly from my macbook, or I use a portable, rechargable music box. All my lamps are LED.

My monthly bill was 5 euro a month.

Quadalupe wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 01, 2018 7:55 am

So, is this the place to brag about your low energy usage? This year, (feburari 2017 - februari 2018) I used a total of 493 kWh.

Yeah sure. Brag away.
Family of three: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6368&start=75#p145240
'Family' of One: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6368&start=75#p154287

FBeyer wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 01, 2018 8:30 am

Yeah sure. Brag away.

Oh damn, nice. Very motivational to see that people like you manage to go even lower! My freezer alone will use 100 kWh/year... I use an electric water cooker for tea, and cook electric (not induction). Maybe there is some room for optimization there.

Do you measure specific appliances, or do you simply look at the meter every once in a while?

I just look at the meter about once every year.
We bake a lot of bread and we use the induction stove to heat water. Apparently it uses very little electricity. I honestly didn't know. I wouldn't fret too much about reducing your electricity bill much further though.

Or in other words: We pay so much in fees that if we spent twice as much power our bill would basically be the same. Maybe 15% more expensive or so.

Just recently I have done my annual energy usage log for my energy provider.
I used 171 kwh in 381 days. (heating is not included)
That makes about 0.45 kwh p.d.
It is a decrease of about -23% compared to last year.
It cost 159€. Energy is expensive in Germany. My energy bill is way lower than compared to the average single-household usage.
I don't think I could lower it even more, but who knows.

FBeyer wrote: ↑

Thu Mar 01, 2018 11:47 am

We pay so much in fees that if we spent twice as much power our bill would basically be the same. Maybe 15% more expensive or so.

Not if you use a provider without fees, such as nettopower.dk

341 KWh for the full year Nov 17/18, down from 413 Kwh Nov 16/17.
Still a family of three. A lot less baking this year though.

Eureka wrote: ↑

Sat Mar 31, 2018 4:07 pm

Not if you use a provider without fees, such as nettopower.dk

Agreed, look for plans aimed at second home owners, they take out the daily standing costs and fees, but charger higher rate/kWh, but if you are a super low user, you can save $$$. These plans definitely exist in the UK, but not sure about availability in DK.

FBeyer wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 15, 2018 8:27 am

341 KWh for the full year

Wow. And I thought we are doing well by not heating water or using heating... but we still use ~150 kwh a month between (led) lightning, shower, oven, fridge and pc & laptop.

Does this include extra electricity from solar panels?

Also, do you use gas as well?

Those numbers are stunning. I'll never get anywhere near you guys (and I'm trying really hard).

Bankai wrote: ↑

Thu Nov 15, 2018 3:25 pm

Wow. And I thought we are doing well by not heating water or using heating... but we still use ~150 kwh a month between (led) lightning, shower, oven, fridge and pc & laptop.

Does this include extra electricity from solar panels?

Also, do you use gas as well?

No gas. No solar panels.
We've done nothing in particular to keep expenditure down. Our house is naturally small so we can light the entire living space with two cheap bulbs. We use kindles, ipad and a laptop. No large stationary computer. Not one that's in use that is.

This last year we used 2252 kWh in electricity, this is about half the UK median. However this year we have stopped externalising a lot of our energy use with DW staying at home through the day with DD, I expect our usage to shoot up considerably when I run the numbers again in May (DD will be 1 yo). We heat the water/ central heating with gas, our oven is electric, but the stove top is gas, we used 9655 kWh gas which is still low by UK standards, but more than I was expecting.

Ouch.

I think the 55" TV, sounds system and tower PC need to go. Otherwise, I'm not sure how else I can cut back. I'm not sure how much an effect the TV has. DW leaves it on unattended constantly. I need to put the auto-off mode back on!

I was about to post another update here about my energy use, but decided to post it to my journal instead, check it out if you are interested.

My house (two people) used 270 KwH of electricity in the most recent billing period at a cost of $50. 270KwH is about half the local average.

We used 105 therms of natural gas at $80. This is a little higher than the local average even though the house is probably smaller than average. I suspect this is because there is insufficient insulation and because we keep the house relatively warm.

We used 3600 gallons of water at $60. Apparently this is on the low end of typical for two people. I'm going to look for leaks because it looks like about 15 gallons per day gets used even when no one is home.

Water usage can really add up, it's surprising. I seem to remember DW and I use a combined 75-100 gallons a day (we are both here 99% of the time as well) when we are doing laundry and a bit less when we aren't. Long showers and not letting the yellow mellow all contribute! Our old jacuzzi tub, which we got for free, is probably 40-50 gallons by itself - thankfully it's not used much now that DW is pregnant.

vexed87 wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 07, 2019 12:04 pm

DW leaves it on unattended constantly. I need to put the auto-off mode back on!

Ugh, I hate this so much. It doesn't happen here but I am constantly turning off the unattended TV at my in-laws ( and hiding the remote ). Auto off setting should be 1 minute!